Fatal familial insomnia is a rare genetic disease caused by misfolded proteins called prions. Children have a 50% chance of inheriting the disease, which hits later in life and has no cure.

Fatal familial insomnia treatment focuses on managing symptoms. There’s currently no cure. Because FFI is so rare, there’s no standard protocol for how to manage the symptoms.

For example, fatal familial Insomnia is an illness in which the victim initially has difficulty falling and staying asleep, lapses from quiet wakefulness into sleep with the enactment of dreams ...

Brain scans of a patient with fatal familial insomnia. (Image credit: Tingting Lu, Yuhang Pan, Lisheng Peng, Feng Qin, Xiaobo ...

Insomnia combines with Fatal Familial Insomnia when the sleep is persistently hindered and causes severe and progressive disruption in the brain's function.

And scientists believe that a cure for fatal familial insomnia, rare as it is, may open the door to cures for other rogue protein diseases, and similar maladies like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Fatal familial insomnia can be deadly. Medical reports of the disease first surfaced in the 1980s, after an Italian man named Silvano presented himself to neurologists with a dire prediction: He was ...

Only a few dozen families are known to carry the mutation for fatal familial insomnia. A blood test would reveal if I’d die in the same terrifying way.

Context: Fatal familial insomnia (FFI) is a genetically transmitted neurodegenerative prion disease that incurs great suffering and has neither a treatment nor cure. The clinical literature is ...

Hayley, 37, and Lachlan Webb, 35, were diagnosed with fatal familial insomnia (FFI), a disease that has alreadyclaimed the lives of their mum, grandmother, aunt and uncle, eight years ago. 4.